@dynamoe lol hi, thank you, I'm not dead yet! I've just been doing adult art and fic in another fandom for a while. Everyone's moved to discord where we can post and discuss art and fic with things like tits and dicks.
One year (+ 1 day) ago—July 9, 2021— I put up The Many Moods of Billy Quizboy which was inexplicably popular. A top 9 post on last year!
To see if I've gotten any better in 366 days of drawing Billy, I reworked the original heads and then drew six more heads.
Did I improve? What do you think? Should I draw another 12?
→ x-posted to Instagram→ see all Billy & White
I do vector art which is made up of layered shapes (rather than lines filled with color) so drawing a cartoon without lines takes advantage of the medium. Ideally, I would remove all line work from the character for shaded forms.
I used reference from across all seasons (over 17 years) so some of the heads don't entirely match. More tinkering is needed to make sure they all look like the same person. (Top right is particularly egregious.)
His head defies all concepts of normal human anatomy and seems have non-Euclidean geometric properties that make it come out wrong most of the time. This took a hundred hours, even with half of the heads already drawn.
The Many Moods of Billy Q. July 9, 2021
If I were a serial killer, the police would find this in my lair:
I took a month off, but I'm getting my ducks in a row for a crazy long chapter. Here's the first bit of it while I hammer out the rest and figure out what to draw for it.
✈️ Chapter 6 Preview ✈️
“How can they lose our luggage? That thing was the size of a frickin’ planet,” Billy spat, incandescent with rage, while storming out of the door from baggage claim of SEA-TAC airport.
“Our bag is not lost, it’s in St. Louis,” White said slowly and calmly, a practiced master in the art of Billy-whispering.
↓ continues under the fold ↓
“A direct flight. Point A to Point B. No stopovers. HOW do they lose a bag?!” Billy muttered, still furious.
“They have our number at the hotel and they will contact us when they can get it back to us.”
“All our clothes were in there,” Billy suddenly remembered, “Shit! Even our invention for our presentation was in that bag!”
“It’s fine, Billy,” Pete rested his hand on Billy’s head with gentle pressure, “Do you want to ride around on the baggage carousel for a while until you can calm down?”
“I have to keep wearing THIS,” Billy furiously indicated the hated and now extra-rumpled short pants suit he had spent an uncomfortable three hour flight pulling out of self-administered wedgies.
“Seriously, don’t worry,” Pete said with more force, tipping down his sunglasses, “All of the essential paperwork I have on my person and I always take the liberty of putting five-large in unmarked bills up where no security’s gonna look for it, if you get my meaning.”
Billy processed. “You put… five-thousand dollars in cash… up your ass?”
“Yeah, while you were in the x-ray line,” White said casually, looking through his shoulder bag for the plastic raincoat, “I do it before I fly anywhere as extra insurance in case something goes down.”
Billy still processed. “Why would you… I mean, it’s not illegal to have $5000 in your wallet.”
“It’s a habit I picked up when I was flying down to Mexico every week when I was doing a lot of… recreational traveling,” White said, squeezing sunblock onto his palm, “Just puts my mind at ease knowing it’s there.”
Billy stopped struggling with the ‘why’ and shifted to the mechanics “How big around is five thousand dollars? I mean, even if it’s only 50 hundred-dollar-bills coiled really tightly it’s gotta be a diameter of–”
“Let’s get a cab into town,” Pete slapped the oozing sunblock roughly onto his face, “Airports are depressing.”
Boy Genius on AO3 | Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
I've been drawing my theoretical concept for a Conjectural Technologies: ORIGINS spin-off for months, so I finally committed to putting words to it.
Your eyes will be better off reading on A03 but I'll post chapters here if it gets it to people who'd want to read this sort of thing.
Chapter 1 is below the fold ↓
Fifteen years pass (more or less).
Norman has Stormed.
The Man from Hope gets inaugurated.
Downtown LA smolders while the Balkans are sparking.
And then this shit...
Fifteen years pass (more or less). Norman has Stormed. The Man from Hope gets inaugurated. Downtown LA smolders while the Balkans are sparking.
And then this shit...
Chapter 1: I'm A Loser, Baby
“Fffzzztttt… just your average kids but--- chhhhh…. their parents say there’s a problem! Help! They’re teenagers now and wow, they’re out of control!”
Plink! A bottle cap ricocheted off to the upper left. Jenny remained unfazed, being as she was pre-recorded a thousand miles away in Chicago.
“Fffzzztt… to a MAKEOVER or it’s off to BOOTCAMP! Today, on the Jenny Jones Show….fzzzztt….”
A second bottle cap grazed Jenny Jones’s shoulder as she turned to a stage full of stewing parents sitting next to children in corpse paint, 12” platforms and spiked mohawks straight out of central casting for “miscellaneous dystopian thugs” in a Chuck Norris film.
Another bottle cap arced high and dinged off the bent-wire-hanger aerial, the static finally consuming the image entirely.
“Got it. Pretty fucking good for having no goddamn depth perception,” Billy slurred to an empty trailer, cracking open the last of the Zima four-pack. He rubbed the eyelid over his missing eye, no idea where his eyepatch went but didn’t care.
“’Zima’ means winter in Polish, Slovene, Slovak, Serbo-Croat, and Czech? There’s some fucking trivia for you,” he mumbled while choking down his 4th bottle of the day, trying not to think about how tasted like drinking scotch tape soaked in air freshener. Or like flat Sprite mixed with aluminum foil and rubbing alcohol. Zima was clear (all the best products were these days) and it was cheap. The TV commercial for Zima showed irreverent hip young people laughing with some loser in a dumb hat who couldn’t pronounce his esses right so maybe the product spoke to him. Most importantly, the product made him drunk. He laid back in his nest of empties and snack food and trash on the couch.
The door squeaked and rattled as Pete White struggled to open it with his foot, his arms full of packages. He staggered a few feet and he released his armload onto the kitchenette counter into a postal landslide. He turned back to notice Billy on the couch where he had left him— unshowered, unshaved, in the same dirty clothes, scowling with a smoldering cigarette hanging off his lip.
“Encounter: level 12 Alcoholic Divorced Dad Dwarf of Middle Earth. Plus-one against child support.”
“Ugh. Shut up,” Billy muttered as flicked ash into a branded Conjectural Technologies coffee mug. One of 500 White had ordered to “get their name out there,” and then left in a pile in the storage closet.
“Aw, Jeeze,” Pete grumbled, fanning the smokey air with last month’s issue Sassy from the mail pile, “You know it’ll be impossible to get the smell out of the curtains. Do you have to smoke in here? Huh?”
“Do you have to put magnetic poetry all over my hand when I’m sleeping?” Billy angrily raised his magnet-crusted mechanical hand, shedding “majestic” “symphony” and “purple” as he moved it.
White smirked, internally delighted, “I couldn’t find a pen so I was leaving you a note reminding you to get a haircut. I feel like I’m living with a scale model of Snake Pliskin.”
“WhatEVER,” Billy snarled. He didn’t disagree his long greasy hair made him look like an Irish Setter drowning in Crisco but what did it matter? Nothing mattered.
White frowned. “You’re really harshing the dynamics of our double act, pally, with this self-pity thing. I can’t play dryly acerbic without a naive optimist to play off of, y’know.”
“I’m just…” Billy killed the last of the bottle and pitched it weakly into the pile, his anger drained, “You know if I went to MIT like I planned to I would have graduated this summer.”
He flicked “languid” and “cacophony” off his wrist, “Maybe I’d even have a doctorate, too. I dunno.”
White busied himself with the mail. Billy wasn’t throwing out accusations yet but his train of thought could turn ugly for him depending how the ZIMA hit him.
“I was the greatest mind in a generation. What am I doing with my life?” Billy muttered, staring at the burning end of his cigarette. Melancholy, “I shelve books part-time at a public library! An ape could do my job,”
“An ape would probably do it better! Because they have longer arms. Oh, and they could climb the shelves!” White chimed in, “But they’d probably, like, crap everywhere so that’s a minus.”
“Nights I wash fucking dishes at a ‘50s-themed diner in a mall.” A sudden rage, “A WILDLY INACCURATE ‘50s-themed diner!” He jumped to his feet.
“We Built This City on Rock & Roll — released 1985 by Starship — does not belong on the house music! ‘Chicken fingers’— invented 1976 in Savannah, GA — do not exist in 1955! I tell the general manager all the time, but does he care? Where’s the stifling suburban malaise? Where’s the simmering feeling of nuclear dread? This so-called ‘theme’ your institution perpetrates is willful disinformation!”
White relaxed; this rant could go on for hours and he wasn’t the target.
Billy concluded, “Being an adult SUCKS.”
“Takes most people more than a year into it to figure that out. Still a genius. Congratulations, Billy,” White said.
Billy sighed, exhausted again. He crawled back to the couch.
“I finally cleared out the PO Box.,” White said, indicating the packages on the kitchen counter.
“Mine. Mine. Mine,” White claimed a stack of music mags and mailers from bedroom record labels out of the mail pile. He tapped a box from a scientific supply warehouse, “That’s probably the catalyst solution we ordered for the mind control experiment.” He found a couple padded envelopes in the pile and shook them, “VHS tapes. From your internet super highway nerd friends. Go soak in nostalgia. Get the stink off you.”
Billy perked up slightly. White raised his arm to toss them over but Billy shrieked, “No! Don’t! You’ll damage them.”
White rolled his eyes, and walked the packages to the couch, “They made it through the mail from —” he checked the labels “— Murfreesboro just fine. They’re not going to break eight feet from me to you.” He stacked the envelopes on the top of Billy’s head and joined him on the couch.
White sorted the remaining mail into piles. More supplies for Conjectural Technologies projects. Bills. Catalogues. Another letter from Billy’s mother — oof, save that for later. He wanted to keep Billy’s mood up for as long as possible. He pocketed it.
“Whoa,” gasped White.
“What?” muttered Billy, tearing open the first envelope.
“We got an invitation from the World Super Science Forum,” White said, puzzled. A glossy brochure as nearly big as a Trapper Keeper slid out of the envelope, sparkling with metallic ink. It looked like a wedding invitation for a giant who also happened to be an art director.
“As if,” Billy scoffed without even looking up from his coveted “105: The Ticking Monkey. Long Edit. KTLA Cartoon Cavalcade. NOTE: Missing Closing Credits'' VHS tape. All the heavy negotiation on the alt.fan.rustyventure USENET group to set up this trade had finally paid off.
“It’s gotta be the sign,” White gestured to the ceiling, above which $700 ($1344 today) of neon he commissioned to flash their company name to a rarely-traveled backroad in the middle of the desert, tripling their electricity bill. “Neon demands respect.”
Billy was a million miles away, squinting at the tape’s edges for potential cracks in transit and mentally tabulating how many more episodes eluded his decades-long quest for a complete collection of the series.
“Word must be getting out about our…,” White beamed in salesman mode before stumbling on the landing, “Uh, work?”
Conjectural Technologies didn’t do shit and both of them knew it. But here was an invitation to the premier professional Super Science conference in the US.
“It’s in Seattle this year. That’s like the coolest city in the world right now.”
“Frasier lives there,” Billy said flatly. He was still woozy. Zima-drunk.
“It’s basically the new Vatican,” White agreed, “Ground zero for both the tech and expensive coffee industry and the home of ‘the Seattle sound.’”
“They throw fish. In the market,” Billy said, suddenly very sleepy. Why did he drink so much Zima? Oh, he remembered it was because he hated himself and his garbage-failure life.
White read through the brochure like a kid tearing into a Sears Christmas Wishbook, “Technology demos. Lectures. Hey, we’d get to go to an awards dinner at the top of the Space Needle. This looks so cool.”
“We should go,” Billy said, drifting into semi-consciousness.
“Yeah!” White turned to the final page of the invitation. Early registration - $550 ($1044 in today’s money) a person. Does not include airfare. “Oh.”
He showed Billy the price without speaking. They both sat silently. Living paycheck to paycheck, that was astronomically outside their budget.
“THIS is why Super Science is dying out,” Pete said angrily, slapping the brochure, “It’s like, you gotta be a legacy or already have a compound or a ton of government contracts to even pay for this shit. It’s MORIBUND! The same old scientists. Same old IDEAS. What about the scrappy independents on the fringes! THAT’s where the next big thing is coming from.”
“A lot of passion from a ‘scientist’ who does jack shit,” Billy snickered, half-asleep.
Pete looked at the brochure again, “It’s too bad we didn’t get invited earlier. It says here ‘Boy Genius’ admission is half-price.”
“Makes sense,” Billy muttered, “Trying to stem the tide of potential future science geniuses defecting to Silicon Valley. No kid even thinks about going into Super Science anymore.”
“AND their parent/guardian/sidekick/lab assistant can plus-one for free — I’m at least two of those!”
A pause.
“Just tell them I’m a kid.”
“Huh?”
“Register me as a ‘boy genius’ and take the discount.”
White was shocked, “You want to lie?”
“If they find out what can they do to us? Kick us out?”
“Did your high horse bolt the stable? Dishonesty from Baby Billy “I Never Do Anything Wrong” Whalen?”
“JUST LIE!” Billy shouted, “Register Conjectural Technologies for the Conference. One Boy Genius. One… whatever you are.”
I adapted a storyline from my White & Billy flashback spin-off into fiction. This kind of writing is not something I've ever done before, so I apologize in advance to the reader and to God.
I'm diving in with no real plan but a lot of notes. I'm posting drafts as I write them so this may be a rambling shaggy-dog kind of story.
Read the cold open/prologue under the fold ↓ or on AO3 which is easier on the eyes and doesn't insert weird line breaks and does text-wrap around images.
All TW and CWs are comparable to the source material -- nihilism, mean jokes at the expense of an innocent, genetic disorder mockery, bad parenting, obscure references
__
'Professor' Putnam tapped the green-and-white computer print-out with his pipestem, “You’ve got a good all-arounder here, Ms. Whalen.”
Ms. Rose Whalen released a breath she hadn’t realized she was even holding. She knew her water-baby was brilliant, of course, but to have it confirmed by a computer, an impartial logical thinking machine ensconced in a temperature controlled room in the basement of a major university! And then to have it read out to her by the undisputed national expert on child overachievers felt like winning the mother-lottery!
Her preschooler son in the threadbare harvest gold chair next to her was less enthusiastic, not even bothering to look up from the World Book Encyclopedia (Volume Ca-Ch) he had buried his face in. Before this meeting his mother emphasized he needed to be “good” which meant sitting quietly. Both implied demands of that expectation – sitting upright and not talking-- required all of his focus.
Despite the large windows, the office of Prof. “Peebo” Putnam (scout-agent-manager to junior brainiacs, wunderkinder, prodigies, and miscellaneous baby genii)- felt dark and cave-like. Dust coated every surface and the overstuffed office presented an absolute maximum of surfaces to coat—overloaded bookshelves lined the walls, piles of scripts on desks, extra chairs brought in just to hold more paper piles, dozens of discarded coffee cups (both itinerant paper and hefty hand-thrown ceramic) leaving rings on yellowing headshots.
“Hmmm,” Another thoughtful drag on the pipe, “Highest percentile on memorization with a 98% recall. Problem-solving— excellent. Temperament— excellent. Vocabulary— excellent.”
Putnam’s grunt of approval carried weight. He basically invented whole “boy genius” genre thirty years prior with his little roadshow to cheer up our boys fighting overseas. Now boy geniuses were everywhere—writing columns in newspapers and endorsing products and appearing on prime-time variety shows. You couldn’t launch a new sitcom without a pesky smart-aleck neighbor or irritating know-it-all neighbor kid these days. Anyone in the business could tell you – if you need a pint-sized Einstein, you came to Peebo.
“Oh, that’s marvelous,” Ms. Whalen chirped, leaning towards her son in chair beside her, “My Billy’s had such a hard year, he deserves some good news at last!” His mother shook his shoulder congratulatorily, throwing off his balance. Little Billy wobbled and gripped an armrest.
The few patches of Putnam’s office wall not obscured by shelves, files or piles displayed posters for off-off-off-off-Broadway one-man shows for-your-consideration bus ads for yesteryear’s boy genius, the faces sun-bleached into indistinct contrast and darkened by a build-up of airborne city soot. Hardly the surroundings deserved of the revered patriarch of a whole archetype but Putnam wasn’t one to rest on laurels. He got his hands dirty. He would never retire; he couldn’t! Boy Genius scouting/managing was his life. (He also owed prodigious alimonies to several ex-wives not to mention court-ordered settlements to former clients who sued him over the years.)
Ms. Whalen winced at the grime and dust of the office momentarily but regained her million-watt smile. She swallowed her homemaker’s urge to take a soapy rag to the whole musty, dusty affair. New York was a horrible, dirty, crime-ridden hellhole but to get the wunderkinder power broker’s eyes on her son was worth taking the Metroliner.
Putnam leaned back in his swiveling chair and rotated himself the precise amount he was free to before colliding with a waist-high stack of old magazines. The chaos of the room was an extension of self to him and second nature to navigate. He drew on his pipe and flicked through the continuous accordion-folded feed of double-wide perf-edged computer print out.
Ms. Whalen steeled herself. She wouldn’t let herself be bullied by the man, legendary authority or not. She stood up to far more intimidating producers back when she herself was in the business of show. (Gosh, it felt like a lifetime ago!) Men like him always
mistook sweetness for weakness. She could use that. She was a hard-nosed advocate for her son’s future. Nobody was going to pull a fast one on her watch.
Billy remained fully absorbed in the World Book’s fold-out on the conquests of Charlemagne while taking no note of the battle of wills mounting to determine his future. Did you know Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day, 800 A.D.? That’s a fun fact.
“Ms. Whalen,” Putnam said, straightening in his chair and leaning forward with a furtive air, “This is the most promising preliminary evaluation I’ve seen since the original Whiz Kid trials in ‘41.”
Mothers liked to be flattered. The ol’ “One-in-A-Million” narrative. In every other era “genius” was a once-in-a-generation convergence of talent and circumstance. Mozart. Blaise Pascal. Bobby Fischer. But, like Americans had done to every other industry, Putnam had mass-produced child prodigies—scouted, screened and showcased a new model every year.
Putnam looked her over. No ring on the finger, he noticed. Divorced, maybe? Never married? Women’s Libbers these days, thought they didn’t need a man. A boy needs a father figure, doesn’t he? The kid was a cypher and he couldn’t get too good a look at him.
Putnam flashed what was meant to be a reassuring grin but Rose flashed back to that awful movie about the lovely beachside town and the big rubber shark that ate people. The thoughtful pipe-smoking, silver hair and natty turtleneck sweater shouted ‘professorial respectability’ but there was a something merciless behind his eyes. She felt like George Plimpton was hustling her to buy a used car. Or like George Plimpton was about to breach the water and rip her throat out with his teeth. Time to counter-strike.
“I always knew my little water-baby was special, you know,” Rose smiled beatifically, trying to diffuse the tension, “Ever since that day I found him on the floor with the Saturday New York Times. Oh, he must have fished it out of the basket where I kept the previous week’s newspapers. He couldn’t really walk yet, just sort of shimmied over there...”
Putnam sighed internally, his face a mask of pleasant attention. The mothers always dragged this out. It wasn’t like this back in the old days-- those original Whiz Kids were orphans or had absentee parents or drunk mothers who weren’t allowed to leave the house. He preferred that “hands-off” style of parenting that having a war to worry about excused. Sure, it probably took an emotional toll but was damned more efficient.
“… Well, he had dragged that New York Times over to the middle of the room and completed— IN PEN — completed the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle—”
He trooped those ‘41 Whiz Kids to every USO stage in the South Pacific to perform their one-of-a-kind cabaret of feats of memorization, math puzzles and trivia quiz for homesick GI Joes, reminding them of sons and near-sighted pencil-neck brothers classed 4F back in Omaha. None of his Whiz Kids, still in short pants and bedwetters all, refused to play Guadalcanal because they missed ‘mommy.’
Stateside, he parlayed all that good press into a coast-to-coast weekly radio show. “Prof. Putnam’s Famous Whiz Kids” three times a week offered 15 minutes of answering trivia puzzles sent in by listeners, a news quiz on the week’s current events and frequent interminable monologues about the amazing properties of whatever caustic soda or laxative had been persuaded to underwrite the show that run. By the time television came knocking, the original kids were not as cute as they used to be and had to be replaced. Of course, one Whiz Kid had shot himself in a hotel room while doing a tour show in Lansing, MI anyway, and the other two had gotten wise to his “accounting practices,” That was the beauty part— they all could be replaced and the show went on.
As his mother talked, the boy had slowly began tilting to one side, his head pulling him into a slow-motion tumble. Without breaking her narrative flow, she pressed a palm into the side of his head and gently shoved him back upright.
A
sound like a water-cooler refilling snapped Putnam to attention. “What just happened? Did he faint?”
“Oh, it’s just his center of gravity is a bit off so he weebles and wobbles,” his mother said cheerfully in a sing-songy voice, “But he won’t fall down, Right, water-baby?”
Billy nodded weakly and smiled, looking like a pug trying to pass a kidney stone. Face only a mother could love. Putnam found an excuse to look away in the print-out
"No spikes in one field-- math or chess is usually where we see those and those spikes always come with downsides,” he said as pointed to a line of inscrutable data, “You end up with a kid than can memorize Pi to 20,000 decimals but can’t figure out the right way to sit on a toilet seat.”
“However, a boy genius is harder to sell without a ‘hook,’” he elaborated, “Math Genius. Baby Rocket Scientist. Li’lest Grandmaster.” Putnam sat up and grabbed a pencil, “What musical instruments can he play?”
“Oh Mr. Putnam, he’s only a tiny little boy.”
“The Koreans have a toddler playing Götterdämmerung on a cello twice the size he is. The boy genius ante is always being upped!”
Ms. Whalen looked ashamed, “I— I’m sure he could if he tried.”
“We’ve established your son is brilliant but my job is to find the best way to display that. Make it a marketable commodity, appealing to mass audience. Leading to fame, money, et cetera and so on.”
“Oh, my little water-baby deserves to be famous. He’s had such a hard life of hospitals and surgeries. Being internationally famous is what I want for him more than anything!”
“There’s still time. You’ve started so young. He can’t me more than… 18 months?”
“He’s three and a half!”
Putnam stared at his potential new client. Mother’s precious baby angel looked less like child and more like a scaled-up model of a fetus in situ: 90% head with formless vestigial limbs yet to evolve into purpose. Things like that should be pickled in a jar in a cabinet of curiosities not sprawled on his office furniture, shabby as it was, reading the World Book encyclopedia. The numbers were good but getting at gander at his potential latest discovery gave him pause.
Ms. Whalen read the disbelief on his face, “He’s... small for his age.”
“From the neck down he is,” Putnam sniped under his breath before walking towards her. “You’re a woman of the world. Single mother, right?” He perched on the corner of desk with casual authority, no doubt caking the seat of his sensible slacks with desk dust, “I’m not here to soft-soap you.”
Ms. Whalen leaned inward. This was the hard sell. He’ll either make an offer or demand a sexual favor. She wrapped the chain handle of her purse around her knuckles in case of the latter. She had to admit, though, under other circumstances, she wouldn’t have kicked him out of bed for eating crackers. She always had a soft spot for a silver fox.
“You’ve got, on the outside, a good ten years with a BG – that’s ‘boy genius’ in the industry lingo. Eighteen is the technical cut off, but it’s not safe to handle them after thirteen. They go feral. Vicious. The best case scenario they just burn-out, but more likely they self-radicalize. They’re not evil, per se. Just completely isolated from other people and fed a constant self-aggrandizing message of their own superiority while also constantly comparing them to ideals they always fall short of. Suddenly they start spouting opinions about eugenics and genocide,” Putnam shook his head, “It’s always genocide with boy geniuses.”
Rose blanched and looked for the first time with suspicion at her son. Slumped in the chair, he looked like a beanbag with a face drawn on it more than the next Pol Pot. He had finished reading the encyclopedia and was drawing in the margins of the entry for “CAT (Felis catus) — carnivorous mammals, of the family Felidae.” Did you know domestic cats have up to 100 different vocalizations while dogs only have 10?
“Or, in rare cases, BGs run away to defect to Moscow. The chess champions usually,” Putnam recalled, “The mental illnesses that start manifesting at that age, too. None of these kids is right in the head of course. Add the stress of teenage hormones to those brains and they absolutely crack up. A damned shame. But there’s no such thing as an adult-boy-genius, is there?”
Billy whipped around to face Mr. Putnam, “Why the fuck not?” he squeaked.
“Billy!” his mother gasped.
Billy stared directly at Mr. Putnam, but slowly his eyes rolled downward, as if looking at the floor. Putnam followed his gaze, searching his
office carpet for what had caught the boy’s attention. Ms. Whalen waved him off.
“Oh, no, he’s looking at you but the pressure in his skull pushes the eyeballs downward,” she explained, laughing as if it was an amusing quirk, “The doctors call it ‘sundown eyes.’ Doesn’t that sound pretty? Almost like a song title.”
“Is he… very ill?” Putnam asked, mentally preparing his gentle brush-off. He could maybe work around the kid looking like a souvenir bobblehead but dead boy geniuses don’t make money.
“Not ill. Not terminally ill,” his mother hedged, still smiling, “My water-baby just has has far too much fluid inside his brain. It deforms the skull, you know.”
Putnam noted the boy’s head was shaped roughly like a risen souffle. The scant sprinkling of strawberry blonde tufts did little more than garnish his bulbous brain-case.
Rose stated flatly, “It was a difficult birth.”
Mr. Putnam winced and changed the subject to avoid imagining watermelons being forced through keyholes, “Aren’t you worried the stress of a career might exacerbate his condition. I wouldn’t want to--”
“No. Absolutely not,” Rose was firm, “It’s the best thing for him. My time on stage was the best thing that ever happened to me and I want it for my Billy. And we could use the money of course.”
“But if he puts off treatment for the, uh, cranial… thing,” Putnam’s resolve was wilting. Rose remained adamant, but her eyes moistened.
“A hole was drilled into his skull when he was just a few days old to relieve some of the pressure. To drain the excess cerebrospinal fluid in the brain that could have killed my poor little water-baby.” Rose pulled Billy close to her chest, a faint sloshing sound reverberated from his head. Billy scowled to be pulled away from his book.
“They call it a ‘shunt.’ Initially, when the patient is a tiny baby it's an external tap tethered to a collection vessel.” Putnam visualized a colostomy bag for the brain. Bad look. Murder on a performer’s Q-score.
“The trouble is my Billy’s brain just keeps making too much cerebrospinal fluid! More than any doctor has ever seen! His brain just keeps getting spongier!” Rose fought tears thinking of her son's gelatinous semi-solid brain rolling in the aquarium of his cavernous skull. Billy just at spot on the floor (or just seemed to).
“For now, I take him back to the hospital every week for a power-shunting. The nurse syphons off the fluid in there,” Rose smiled through the tears forming in her eyes, “It’s like dialysis! But higher up!”
Billy pointed at a band-aid on the side of his temple, his arm too short to actually reach it.
“Hydrocephalus is so hard on a sensitive boy. The vomiting. Poor coordination. Sluggishness. Double Vision. Crushed pituitary gland. Unstable balance.”
“Giant head,” Putnam muttered, looked at the contract in his top drawer, internally debating, “I just don’t think your son might be up to… I mean, physically able to a—”
Ms. Rose Whalen rose to her feet, “Professor Putnam. The doctors told me my son would never walk. A body too weak. A brain too heavy. I built him a neck brace and scaffold on wheels with my own hands and we practiced. We walked for miles. Now my precious little water-baby can walk, BY GOD. He can walk and he only falls down… some of or most of the time.”
Rose slammed her hands on his desk. A dust cloud rose, “He can do it. I know he can. I can make him do it,” her gritty determination shining through glistening tears was TONY-worthy. Walter Kerr reviewing for the Times would have shat himself with emotion, “We need this. I need this. And the world needs Billy!”
Putnam stared. Billy squirmed. The sound of a water cooler refilling.
Rose sighed and returned to her seat exhausted, “I’ve heard rumors of an experimental brain surgery that might make a difference in the long term,”
Putnam rested a hand on her shoulder, “Medical science knows so little about the brain, but everyday research discovers new methods—”
“It’s bound to be very expensive and my water-baby is so very small. I—” Rose adjusted her glasses, dabbing her eyes with a
handkerchief. Putnam’s defenses were down, he reached out and touched her hand.
Mr. Putnam met her gaze, “Your Billy is a very special boy and I’m going to do everything I can to make him very, very famous…”
Ms. Whalen flashed a shy, grateful smile. Got him.
“Up until the age where he inevitably goes insane or his brain explodes.” Putnam added casually as he gallantly helped her up.
He walked her to the door, muttering plans for future meetings, auditions, his ‘percentage’ and so on.
“A word of advice, though,” Putnam spoke as his usual shrewdness overtook his momentary sentimentality. He gestured to Billy toddling ahead into the hallway. “Bangs. Long ones. Cover up that noggin up.”
Rose giggled guiltily. “You’re so bad, Mr. Putnam.”
“‘Peebo,’ please,” corrected Mr. Putnam, “If we’re working together.”
“That’s an incredibly stupid name.”
He shrugged, “Show business.”
She lingered in the doorway and whispered conspiratorially, “Sometimes I worry that if my Billy ever got that surgery he might lose his special gift. Not be a boy genius. He’d just be so... ordinary.”
In the hallway, the boy toppled over and vomited.
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